The unexpected is something to be partly cherished. Surprises are, by their nature, only half-good, half of the time.

Surprise Of The Week is handed to Jackass 3D, a film whose puerility is taken for granted, but whose toffee-soft heart is the real shocker. After 90 minutes of bull-baiting, face-planting and antiquing, to finish the movie with a tear-jerking nostalgia-fest, soundtracked to Weezer’s Memories, was the good kind of surprise.

Surprises abound at the moment – I often get emails with subject lines that say, “Do you feature folk/witch house/German sludge metal?” and an accompanying message which admits defeat before it even begins. I often want to feature these bands just to prove them wrong.

Randolph’s Leap is exactly the kind of band I rarely feature, their beautiful and exhaustingly genial folk apparently an anathema to someone with as grouchy as me.

As I Lie In The Mud

As I Lie In The Mud is charming, bitter-sweet, icily lovely – the story of a man who doesn’t fit in and wants to run, or at least sit events out until they have passed. As far as folk jangles go, this one manages to remain breezy whilst retaining the needle-sharp barb to draw your emotions in.

“Euphoria is just a state of mind” states singer Adam, and he’s right of course. This means that sorrow, reminiscence and surprise are all imposters too.

Compared to big-league folksters – albeit MOR-folksters – like Mumford and Sons, Randolph’s Leap, in As I Lie… at least, scramble to emotional heights with much more humility and all the more more believably. A brilliant, smile-leeching delight.

myspace.com/randolphsleap